


Incipit

by Haeronwen



Series: Death and All His Friends [1]
Category: Jurassic Park (1993), Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: AU, Angst, F/M, Lowery Cruthers Appreciation, No Kids - Freeform, PTSD, Pining, Prequel, Raptors, Snark, UST, Women Being Awesome, all that good stuff, backwards and in high heels, clever girls, palaeontology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-13 19:25:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4534248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haeronwen/pseuds/Haeronwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“You’re telling me Masrani got the raptors a damn lawyer?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I’m telling you he got them a palaeontologist.”</em>
</p><p>In the five years following the Isla Nublar Incident—always the incident and never the catastrophe—the number of applicants for undergraduate courses in Palaeontology and Evolutionary Science rises by forty per cent. James Clarke was born of the park, even if she's never set foot in it before now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**first iteration.**

_“The rewilding of natural ecosystems that fascinates me is not an attempt to restore them to any prior state, but to permit ecological processes to resume.”_

George Monbiot

———

He’s fixing up his bike when the gas jeep bounces up the incline that passes for a driveway.  He stays put; no one bothers coming up here unless it’s to express unwelcome opinions ( _you got a death wish? that it, Grady?_ ) or to throw numbers at him.  Animals have no use for zeroes, and Owen doesn’t either.  There was a message blinking on his machine this morning—Masrani’s assistant, courteous as ever, telling him to expect company.

This company’s definitely not corporate.  No suit, for a start; if the old school wheels weren’t indication enough, there’s a scrap of a girl behind the wheel dressed in t-shirt, shorts and dark sunglasses.  Not a suit and not a ranger, but he knows trouble when he sees it and this one has it written all over her.

“Mr Grady?” she says, as she reaches him, and extends a hand.  “I’m James Clarke, Mr Masrani told you I was coming?”  Her hand is small and cool, her grip surprisingly firm—and her eyes, when she removes her sunglasses, are very blue.  _Trouble_ , he thinks.  All kinds.  The accent is British, but she’s not exactly stiff upper lip; has the kind of tan you don’t get lying by the pool.

“Novak said to expect someone.”

“Not the specifics, then.”  She sounds almost apologetic, which isn’t quite in line with what he’s come to expect from Masrani’s ‘progress reports’.

Still, he’s not giving an inch.

“Why don’t you bring me up to speed.”

Owen doesn’t miss the way she looks at him, then, like she’s getting the attitude but she’s not about to back down.  She shifts her weight, just a little, so that it’s on the balls of her feet.  He’d find it funny—slip of a thing, a head at least shorter, squaring up to him—if he weren’t so pissed off.

“Mr Masrani feels strongly that the wellbeing of the animals should be a priority,” she says, carefully.  “Your project is breaking new ground, and he wants someone representing their interests.”

“You’re telling me Masrani got the raptors a damn lawyer?”

“I’m telling you he got them a palaeontologist.”

-

In the five years following the Isla Nublar Incident—always the incident and never the catastrophe—the number of applicants for undergraduate courses in Palaeontology and Evolutionary Science rises by forty per cent (karma might be a bitch, but PR’s a bigger one).  The year that Jurassic World opens to the public, James sits in front of Bristol’s Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology in what amounts to a stationary cupboard, because the Earth Sciences building is undergoing renovation.  (In the four years she ends up spending there, it’s never not undergoing renovation.)  She’s seventeen and wearing her school skirt because she doesn’t own anything else interview-appropriate, which turns out not to matter because all the other candidates are in jeans.

When he asks about a book that particularly impacted her, she doesn’t mention Alan Grant.  She doesn’t tell him that for weeks after reading _Site A_ she would dream in fits of shadows with teeth and claws chasing her down dark alleys; doesn’t describe the look on her mother’s face when she noticed it on the shelf, or the way everything shifted, subtly, between them after that.

James talks about Brusatte’s work on tyrannosaur evolution and the dangers of failing to account for change in living biological systems.

The words taste like ashes on her tongue.

-

Her first dig site is Kimmeridge Bay, and it changes everything.  The third year lab/field assignments are posted on the noticeboard outside the admin office, and _Clarke, J._ is down for five hours a week at the museum, hyphen archives.  She’s already drowning in paper and resigned to six weeks of index cards, except that the week she’s due to start her Evo lecturer pulls her aside.

“You’ll want to see this,” he says.

It’s a couple of hours down to the coast, where the wind rips the Neuroethology notes from her hands and her boots—brand new, half price at Go Outdoors—sink into the sand.  There’s a guy with a cigarette hanging from his mouth handing out lanyards and hard hats, who looks her up and down with an infuriating combination of scepticism and appreciation, then directs her beyond the sign declaring “access strictly prohibited”.

“It’s a lot of red tape,” Andrew says, beside her, like all the paperwork she had to sign wasn’t indication enough.  She was up till three in the morning, going through it line by line.  Risk assessment, health and safety—a little different than the one she’d had to sign for the archives, less unstable ladders and more potential for loss of limb.  Access to Kimmeridge Bay isn’t just prohibited, it’s a logistical nightmare: cliff falls, high tide, and the difficulty of getting a dig team out there to begin with.  It’s a three mile hike just to reach the site, and the climb down’s no laughing matter either; she’s breathless by the time she reaches the bottom, shins scraped raw against the rock. 

“It’s not just accessibility,” he explains.  “It’s the time frame.  Getting the land owner’s permission.  Funding.”

The sky is white, overcast; she can see it reflected in the set of shoulders, in that urgency of motion overshadowed by sheer _anticipation_.  James watches as a man with rather spectacular sideburns shouts at another man with an ill-advised moustache, before introducing himself to Andrew as the Collections Manager from the NHM.  (He doesn’t look at James, except to frown at her grazed knees.)

They’re a million miles from Montana (4450, to be precise): this is the Dorset coast in February, and ten minutes in she can’t feel her face.  She’s the only woman on site, but at least she’s not fetching coffee—if only because everyone there is already packing a Thermos.  It’s not comfortable and it’s not glamorous, but she feels the spray of the ever encroaching ocean and the shifting sand beneath her feet and it’s _something_.  Her neck aches and her calves burn and her fingers are swollen, but there’s rock and sand and _bone_ beneath their tips and that’s something more.

When Andrew says, “This one’s a game changer,” she thinks she might know what he means.

-

Whispers carry in lecture halls; it’s a small course, everyone knows everyone, and James is well aware what _everyone_ is saying.  She was down for archive work, and now she’s on a high profile field assignment, turning up to seminars sleep-starved and dishevelled, disappearing for long weekends with barely disguised enthusiasm.  Her housemate, Anna, tells her how good she looks as if it’s astonishing that she’s finally making an effort, when in truth James has lost five pounds in six weeks living off coffee and granola bars.  (Evidently, looking good requires that a girl be ninety per cent caffeine and borderline malnourished.)

It’s all just… white noise.  Static, when there’s sand in her hair and dirt on her cheek and she’s looking at something one hundred and fifty million years in the making—something old enough to make mankind seem young, vast enough to make them seem small.  It’s hard, physical work, and it takes the sort of time that should have had her climbing the walls, but it also makes a kind of sense that she never anticipated.  There’s a logic to it, a rhythm, a right way to go about it and a wrong, and when James is on site she feels like she can _breathe_.  All the labs and the dissections and the cladograms in the world don’t compare to the way she feels standing on that beach.

The third time she stays behind after hours, labelling photographs, Andrew says, “you should really go home,” like it’s as simple as that.

There’s a shot of the skull and she keeps her eyes fixed on the line of the jaw, the teeth, the skeletal smile.  Broken down into parts, pieces, to be labelled and packed up and sent off, maybe it is.  Maybe it is as simple as that.

She doesn’t say this out loud.  She says, “I want to get as much hands on experience as I can.”

(“Is _that_ what we’re calling it,” asks Joe Slater, in their Tuesday morning lecture.  She pours her coffee into his lap.)

-

The year that James packs up her boots and her _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ box set and moves across the pond, Claire Dearing sits in front of Ellen DeGeneres in Louboutins and a Dior pantsuit and says, with assurance, “We’ve learnt more from genetics in the past decade than a _century_ of digging up bones.”

-

Annapolis is 2043 miles from Montana; the summers are hot and humid, and the winters are cool.  The days she’s not driving out to survey biofacies in Arundel clay James spends wandering the downtown, the cobbled streets and Ego Alley and the waterfront.  Sometimes she sits in a coffee shop and watches people go by and thinks that 3537 miles in five years isn’t bad.

Sometimes she sits in a coffee shop and watches people go by and thinks that it will never be enough.

-

Michael calls as she’s getting out of the shower.  “I was hoping to speak to Dr Clarke—I don’t have an appointment.”

“Fuck off,” she says, with affection.

“I know,” he says, “I do, you’re a busy woman now that you’ve gone and discovered that _Diplodocus_ —”

“ _Deinonychus_.”

“—and now all the dinosaurs are calling in wanting to know when you’re going be taking their pictures, I get it, it’s tough being the next big thing—”

“Again, fuck off.”

“—when I came third in the Rokeby Prep poetry competition I had no time for family either.”

“Are you done?”

“Would you like me to recite Ode To A Skittle I Found on the Floor of the Library?”

“ _No_ , I beg you.”

“Then consider calling once in a while.”

“You’ve made your point,” she says, drily.  “You are such an arsehole.  It’s a good job I love you.”

“Not an asshole?”

“The American hasn’t quite taken root in me yet.”

He looks good, she thinks, though Skype isn’t always the best indication.  His hair is longer than she’s ever seen it, and his face is fuller, for which she suspects she has Oscar to thank.  She only ever feels the distance this way when she’s talking to Michael—might not miss home, but she sure as hell misses him.

“Dad read your article,” he tells her, and she can’t help but hear the addendum.  ( _Mum didn’t._ )

“What did he think?”

“He said the beginning was a little slow, but it really picked up toward the end.”

“What did _you_ think?”

“I understood about every other word.  I thought the diagrams showed a nice aesthetic.”

She presses a hand to her chest.  “It warms the heart to hear you say that.”

“Oscar has it pinned to the fridge, he’s like a proud parent.”

James grins.  “You two should come visit,” she says.  “It’s been too long since I’ve tasted Oscar’s lemon meringue pie.”

“Or,” Michael says, after a moment, “you know, you could come home.”

It’s a familiar exchange.  The response is on her lips before he’s finished speaking.

“I can’t afford to leave the site at the moment.”  Like it’s a hardship, as opposed to a relief.  “Maybe when things have settled down.”

“Sure,” he says, like he knows better, and by this point he probably does.  “When things have settled down.”

-

Fourteen hours later, Simon Masrani walks into her lab in Silver Hill—more accurately, into the lab utilised by Paul Egerton of the Smithsonian, in which she is allocated a corner—and introduces himself like he hasn’t broken top ten on the _Forbes_ Rich List eight years running.  Like his face isn’t plastered over front pages of newspapers and magazines praising his philanthropic efforts and the cut of his suits.

Like she has no idea who he is.

“It is a great pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr Clarke,” he says, with almost disarming fervour.  “I read your findings on the Arundel _Deinonychus_ remains with great interest.”

“I’m glad you found them useful,” James replies, conscious of the need to choose her next words carefully.  “I know that your company expressed interest in purchasing the specimens.”

Theirs is one of the few sites north of the Equator not owned or at least part-funded by InGen or other subsidiaries of Masrani Global, and she’ll be damned if that changes on her watch.

Masrani shakes his head.  “That is not why I am here,” he assures her.  “I do, however, have a proposal of another kind I would discuss with you.”

-

They have lunch at Fiola Mare, because Simon Masrani does not do things by halves.  For those who spend seven years in Higher Education certain habits are hard to shake and James is the sort of girl who never passes up a free meal.  She orders two desserts in place of a main course and is gratified by the look of disapproval on the waiter’s face.  Her companion, by contrast, doesn’t even blink.

“You studied under Andrew Rooper at Bristol, I think.”  It’s not a question; half an hour in and it’s already evident that Simon Masrani doesn’t make a habit of asking questions.  That fact is simultaneously reassuring and deeply unsettling.  “I met him at a conference several years ago; a very astute man.”

“He was a fantastic supervisor,” James says, truthfully.  “I couldn’t have asked for better.”

“And now you work for the Smithsonian.”

“For the duration of this project,” she agrees, “yes.”

“And how long do you anticipate that being?”

She frowns.  “I’m sorry?”

Masrani sets down his fork, presses his napkin delicately to his mouth.  “The duration of your project, as you put it.  Do you have an end date?”

“That will depend on a number of factors—”

“Funding foremost among them.”  Again, not a question.  “As it stands, your stipend will allow for six more months and then you face a fork in the road, as it were.”

“I’m not sure I take your meaning.”  (“I’m not sure I want to,” is implied.)

“An opportunity has arisen at one of my businesses for someone of your talents, should you be open to it.”

Her heart is beating irrationally quickly, because he’s looking at her with light and enthusiasm dancing in his eyes and James thinks that she might know exactly what he means.  It’s the dream, is the thing—for most people in her position it would be the dream, but she’s not most people.  She takes a spoonful of bombolone to cover the tremor in her hand, aware that she is fooling no one.  “Mr Masrani,” she says, carefully, “I wouldn’t know the first thing about the animals in your park.”  Lies and butterscotch mingle on her tongue.

Masrani smiles magnanimously.  “I think that you would,” he replies.  “I am certain you would have a great deal to contribute.”

“With respect,” James says, “the animals you’re talking about are not the ones I study.  Genetic engineering can do a lot of things but replicating the product of millions of years of evolution is not one of them.  Your attractions are the result of decades of scientific and technological innovation, and no one’s denying that what you do is astonishing, but it’s also synthetic.”

“I think that when you see them, you will feel differently.”

He’s probably right, but she’s not about to admit it.

“You will take some time to consider my offer,” he says, with assurance, “but I will be seeing you soon, I think.”

She watches Simon Masrani walk away and knows that he’s right, because James is the sort of girl who reads a list of ways she might grievously injure herself and signs on the dotted line.

———


	2. Chapter 2

**second iteration.**

_“The ecosystems that will emerge, in our changed climates, on our depleted soils, will not be the same as those which prevailed in the past.”_

George Monbiot

———

Mornings Owen doesn’t rise with the sun he’s up before it, which is less an occupational hazard of playing primary caregiver to four rapidly developing prehistoric carnivores than it is a hangover from his Navy days.  Truth is, Owen sleeps better now than he can remember doing in a long time, even if adolescence in raptors tends to manifest as _hungry_ rather than surly.  There are nights he doesn’t wake with rent sheets and wet cheeks; there are days he doesn’t close his eyes and see blood and smoke.  It’s enough.  A person can have all the letters behind his name he wants and still not understand that these moments, these reprieves, they’re enough.

Starting out he’d sit at the incubators, check vitals and growth rates, let them nip at his fingers; now he drives out to the paddock and sits cross-legged by the internal gate.  At three months they’d scrabble at the bars, climb over one another and croon until he gave in and tossed them scraps, or—feeling reckless—scratched the scales above their eyes.  Now, in the dark, he sits perfectly still and watches them watch him.  His vision adjusts, if only a fraction—enough that he catches the flash of a tail on the far side of the paddock.  Enough to see the outline of Delta, larger than her sisters, crouched on the other side of the gate.   He can smell her breath, hot and metallic; hears the click of her claw against the bar.

Charlie’s not far behind, never far behind—still too young, too eager, to conceal her movements entirely.  Echo, he thinks, is buried in the foliage on the far side: relegated to the outskirts, always, last to the kill because she’s an asshole and raptors aren’t the forgiving kind.

It’s Blue they’ll never see coming.  Blue, who tumbled out of that egg and into his pocket.  (Blue, who watches the handlers while her sisters watch the kill.)

“Maybe I should get you girls a Wii.”

Delta hisses audibly; behind her, there is an answering snarl.

“No,” he agrees, “you’re right.  Xbox is better.”

-

Barry pulls up just before seven, as Owen’s prepping for the first drill of the day.  Down in the paddock, Charlie gets a little too into Delta’s personal space and is forced to dart out of reach of snapping teeth.  Owen can relate.  Barry says, thoughtfully, “ _Elles sont agitées_.  They are restless.”

“They’re teenagers.”

“It is more than that.”

“Yeah,” he says.  “I know.”  And he does.  They’re frustrated, and understandably—these are creatures capable of sophisticated coordination and problem solving and InGen still has them under a damn microscope, playing fetch and jumping hoops like they’re up for Best In Show.  Doesn’t help that their growth rate is exponential—damn near unbelievable, except that since moving to Isla Nublar he’s started to find very few things surprising—and their paddock, as it stands, is too small.

(“We’re talking about prioritization, Mr Grady.”

“Owen.”

“ _Mr Grady_.  The velociraptors are not currently on display to the public.  I _cannot_ submit to the Board that they be relocated because they’re not smart enough to keep themselves occupied.”

“How about because we’re not smart enough to keep them occupied?”

“I have other attractions to take care of.”

“You let me know if I can help with any of them.”)

Frustrated is putting it mildly.  Owen can relate.

Perceptive as ever, Barry leans against the barrier and says, “She arrives this week?”

“Who?” he asks, lightly, like he doesn’t know better than to bullshit Barry.

“Lana Del Ray.  I understand she is a big fan.”

“We need to get you some better music.”

“Owen.”

“End of the week,” he says.  As if they need another deadline hanging over their heads.  Another vulture to appease.  Bad enough they’ve got Hoskins yapping at their heels.

“You met her?”

Owen turns his back under the pretence of checking the transmitter.  “She showed up on my doorstep last week,” he replies, “talking some shit about animal welfare, like I don’t take care of my girls.”

“It might not be a bad thing,” Barry points out.  “We need help.  We need someone to fight for them.  We _need_ someone who will go to Simon Masrani.”

Ever the voice of reason.  Pity Owen’s unreasonable.  “Masrani might own this park,” he says, “but Dearing runs it.  Least she’s never implied I’m anything short of good at what I do.”

Of course, Dearing is also the reason they can’t get planning for a new enclosure, but Owen’s pissed off and not about to undermine his point.  He hitches the gear over one shoulder and starts down the stairs.

“I know that you do not want another scientist interfering, moving in on your territory—”

“She’s not just moving in, Barry.”  Which, when it comes down to it, is the thing.  “She’s _moving in_.”

-

James has seen the billboards on the roads, the posters at bus stops— _sixty-five million years in the making_ —and footage of brachiosaurs set to the Gladiator soundtrack.  She’s watched John Hammond assure the public that they _spared no expense_ , and a geneticist in a tight turtleneck talk about chickens and eggs.  Her peers at Bristol used to discuss InGen in hushed tones, like a job there was the Grail, like Isla Nublar was the edge of the known world, the frontier of palaeoecology.

She doesn’t know what she expected, exactly, but not _this._   The touch screens and the sand pits, the theme bars and the hamster balls.  The mosasaur exhibit is Sea World on steroids; the petting zoo an episode of Panorama waiting to happen.  InGen are rebuilding entire ecosystems sponsored by Coca-Cola.  Jurassic World is beautiful, and cold, and sterile—all of it, a fish tank they’ve built from steel and glass.

It is simultaneously the most astonishing and most terrifying thing James has ever seen.

There’s no one waiting at the bungalow to meet her when she arrives; it is almost unsettlingly quiet after the hum of Park Proper.  Quiet enough that when she hops down from the jeep she can hear cicadas and the water lapping at the dock, her own footsteps heavy in the dust.  To one side is a space where there might have been a truck, lines in the grass that might be tire tracks.  The bike Grady was fixing the day they met is still sitting in front of the porch, covered with a tarp.  The light is fading but all the windows are dark; she wonders, idly, if he’s still at the paddock, or holed up in the bar she passed on her way here.

Even by Nublar standards, this place is isolated.  She knows that staff at Jurassic World mostly live onsite: the park’s open year round, it makes sense that there would be families here— _children_ , here—but the thought doesn’t make her any less nauseous.  The hotels are for the tourists, but there are complexes built outside the park limits.  Owen Grady lives alone.

 _Lived_ alone.

When she steps up onto the porch, the keys are dangling in the lock.  Small town mentality or nod to her arrival?  She can’t imagine they worry much about crime on this side of the island; it’s a fair stretch from the main park.  Inside is a muddle of patio furniture and ugly upholstery, shelves overflowing with creased paperbacks and a counter dedicated to empty bottles.  It’s frat boy meets hermit, but academics are perpetual students, and she’s seen worse.  Far worse.

The first bedroom looks barely lived in: no curtains, hospital corners.  The second is crammed with boxes.

James scrubs at her face at the kitchen sink, stands for a moment with her hands braced against the counter and water running down her neck.  In the fridge she finds a crate of beer, a jar of pickles, a carton of expired milk and three dozen eggs—all labelled ‘GRADY’ in block capitals.

She drags a deck chair and a bottle of Bud out onto the porch.  Calls Michael again, and tries not to mind when no one picks up.

-

Owen gets in a little after five to find two empty bottles on his porch and James Clarke asleep on his couch.  She’s almost vertical, if a little low in her seat, head tipped back and face pressed into the crease of the arm; he’d feel guilty, except that he likes his space and right at that moment she’s _living_ _in it_.

It’s all a power play.  Masrani doesn’t trust him and never has—Owen was InGen’s hire, not Dearing’s.  Not even Hoskins’, which is a good job, since if Vic had been the one to look him up in San Diego Owen would have laughed in his face.  Truth is, he needed a change, needed an out, and InGen offered him that: turned up on his doorstep with their behavioural profiles and their nondisclosure agreements, all of it shady as fuck, and he jumped at it, didn’t he?  Built some kind of life here.

Figures Masrani would try to assert control eventually; that he’d send someone to assess the situation is predictable.  That he’d put her up in Owen’s spare room is borderline sadistic, and, were he less cynical, something Owen would be inclined to attribute to his own unpopularity with the HR department.  (He could _hear_ the satisfaction in Novak’s voice when he said _housing shortage_.)

It’s still early; Owen could let her sleep a bit longer.

What he actually does is sweep the empty bottles from his counter into an open trash bag, and when she bolts upright on the couch says, “Wake up call, England,” like the considerate roommate that he is.

-

The thing is, they prepped her for Owen Grady.  EOD-1, USN, three tours, Special Warfare Detachment, Marine Mammal Program.  Novak sent his resumé over and James read it, dutifully, on the plane from Baltimore to San Jose, while the woman next to her flipped through Us Weekly.

She wishes there had been a picture.

It’s unprofessional as fuck, but it’s all James can think as he gets to his feet: _shoulders_ and _jeans_ and _jaw_ and she likes to be prepared for this sort of attraction, _damn it_ , because it doesn’t happen all that often but when it does it tends to throw her off balance.  She likes the way he stands and the hole in the seam of his shirt and the way his hand swallows hers—she looks at Owen Grady, and she thinks _yes_.

She has a funny feeling it doesn’t go both ways.

Something about the undisguised scepticism in his eyes when she says Masrani sent her, and the way his accent—barely noticeable to begin with—deepens on _bring me up to speed._   They might have prepped her for Owen Grady, but they clearly didn’t bother prepping Owen Grady for her.

If his initial reception isn’t indication enough, her first day is the confirmation.

Number 537 on her list of Reasons Not To Be On Isla Nublar (number one being _what happened the last time_ ): the sun isn’t up yet, and it’s already unbearably humid.  James is British for fuck’s sake, she’s not equipped to deal with this sort of thing.  (In Britain, any time it’s too hot to drink tea the country has a collective breakdown.)  Grady wakes her up at five with barely concealed satisfaction, and she makes do with the equivalent of a wet wipe shower because her bags are still packed and she can’t remember where she put her shampoo, which would matter less if it weren’t so bloody _humid_.

As if to add insult to injury, he watches her climb out of the passenger seat and says, “You weren’t Dearing’s pick.”

“Excuse me?” James says, like she doesn’t know _exactly_ what he means.  If she weren’t so busy being the face of Masrani Global, Claire Dearing would be the face of Christian Dior; she is fierce and bright and driven, sat on the TIME 100 next to Michael Cors and Michelle Obama, runs a five-star resort and biological reserve and never seems to break a sweat.

Her hair does that flippy thing that James’ won’t.  Claire Dearing is fucking flawless.

The fact that Owen Grady has no sense of self-preservation should come as no surprise to anyone.  He says, “You met her assistant, Zara?”

Rather than admit she hasn’t, James raises an eyebrow.  “Your point being?”

A shrug.  A twist of his lips that might be a smile.  “You weren’t Dearing’s pick.”

-

Barry Ndoye has an easy grace that James envies; soft-spoken where his friend is blunt.  Barry is as accommodating as Grady is uncooperative, walks her through the paddock security the day she arrives and tells her which facilities to avoid.  He stands with her on the platform as his partner argues with one of the technicians.  “Owen is— _il n’aime pas trop la direction_.  He is stubborn.”

“He doesn’t like me,” James agrees.

“But he is good at this.  This is his life.”

“I’m not here to review his performance,” she tells him.  “Or yours.”

There is a whirring on the far side of the paddock as the gate is released.  Barry says, quietly, “ _Vous aurez envie de voir.”_

( _You’ll want to see this._ )

-

They’re huge.  They’re so much bigger than she expected, than she could have anticipated; dart out of the trees in streaks of blue and green and grey, like birds of paradise but with tooth and bloody claw.   Years of paper trails, rock and bone, have not prepared her for this moment.  They are muscle and sinew, sharp eyes and breath-taking speed.  Standing on that platform, seeing them in the flesh, is like waiting on the edge of a precipice—fear and anticipation mingled with something else, something she would rather not acknowledge.

“They respond to him.”  It’s a question, and it isn’t.  They move with calculated precision, and so does Grady; like planets in orbit, or magnets, each movement accounting for the position of the others.  It’s not as simple as hierarchy, she thinks, or learned behaviour.

It’s something new.  _They’re_ something new.  
  
(He's something new.)

-

“What are they?” James asks, on the way back from the paddock, and can tell from the way that he stills, slightly, that she’s on dangerous ground.  It isn’t the first she’s heard of hybridization, particularly in reference to conservation; she spent a year working with the RZSS in Edinburgh, and they liked to throw the term around.  Except that there the object was authenticity—in itself, a problematic concept—and here the motivation appears to be _fun_.

The problem with authenticity is that it is a construct, it is subjective, it has variable definitions.  Authenticity is dependent on criteria determined by a relatively small group of individuals; unanimity in the scientific community is almost unheard of, and new research has the potential to alter accepted principles at any given moment.  But there, at least, James understands the impulse: authenticity implies a degree of predictability, satisfies a basic need for control.  Conservation is the human attempt to regulate its environment, to maintain it, to impose a stasis that is comforting in its familiarity.  Models of authenticity seek to eliminate the unknown.

James knows only too well how violent, how devastating, change can be.  She understands why a person might want to prevent it.  She doesn’t understand this.

She wants to ask how they predict patterns of behaviour, but she looks at Owen Grady, at the scar tissue forming up and down his arms, and thinks she might know the answer.  Instead she asks, “What are they?”

Mistake.  Owen Grady is all hard edges and smart mouth, six feet of barely disguised muscle and attitude, but James has seen enough to know that it’s when he’s silent you should worry.  There is a quiet intensity to Grady that sucks all the air from a room.

(They’ll never see him coming.)

“You’re the expert,” he says, with less venom than usual, and this is how she knows she’s right.  “Enlighten me.”

Someone with more sense, more self-preservation—conscious of the importance of staff cooperation—might have backtracked.  James says, “They’re not raptors.”

“No?”

“They’re not _Deinonychus_ ,” she continues, because she hadn’t expected V _elociraptor mongoliensis_ —nothing the size of _Velociraptor_ would have posed a viable threat.  “ _Achillobator_ , maybe, but the big one—Delta?—she’s _Utahraptor_ , at a guess, though I’ve no idea what they’ve spliced her with that would produce the elongated forearms, or flexibility of the carpus beyond the radial-ulnar plane—”

It’s not characteristically avian, though in other respects Delta appears closer than her pack mates to the birdlike motions one would expect from a creature phylogenetically linked to the house sparrow.  Then again, the biology they’re talking about isn’t _evolutionary_.  There’s more than a little lizard in all of them: something actively reptilian that goes beyond a lack of feathers. 

“In English?” Grady says.  “American, preferably, but I’ll take what I can get.”

“They’re not dinosaurs,” she concludes, like it’s a revelation—and to her, frankly, it is.  She might have said as much to Simon Masrani back in Washington, but the extent of it is flooring.  She hadn’t expected authenticity—the present notion of authenticity—but she’d expected something familiar, something recognisable.  Something comprehensible.

These animals are not dinosaurs.  They’re something new.

Grady exhales; not quite a snort, but something close to exasperation.  “If that’s the case,” he says, pointedly, “what exactly are you doing here?”

It’s a good question.

-

There are postcards in the gift shop on Main Street, on the wall between the t-shirts and the stuffed dinosaurs.  James stands in front of the display for a good forty minutes, torn between the herbivore at the barbecue and the mosquito trapped in amber, before putting both of them back and leaving the shop.

-

Simon Masrani asks, “What are your initial thoughts?” like he expects them to be more lucid than _fucking Christ_ or _we’re going to need a bigger boat._

In this instance, _Jaws_ references aren’t too far off the mark.

“Mr Masrani,” she says, “we need to make some changes.”

-

Grady says, “Alan Grant thinks I’m crazy,” like he’s daring her to agree.

She went to one of Grant’s lectures, once.  Twenty-four and in the middle of her doctorate, flush with the success of her first solo publication, James spent fourteen hours on a plane to Austin drinking wine in an attempt to offset the unsupervised child kicking the back of her seat.  Jetlag had her sleepwalk through the first day of the conference—to this day she can’t recall what it was about coralline algae that had Paul Milano so excited.

She remembers Alan Grant.  Remembers his creased brow, and his checked shirt; all the things he didn’t talk about, all the things she didn’t ask.

James looks at Owen Grady, who sleeps four hours a night and drinks more than is healthy, who will turn his back to carnivorous reptiles but not to her.  She thinks of Michael and the way his mouth twisted when she said _Isla Nublar_.

“Crazy is relative,” she says.

———

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gruff Owen and French Barry, because the heart wants what it wants. I cannot recommend enough _Feral_ , by George Monbiot, which I quote extensively and also inspired large passages of this chapter. Next chapter: Claire, Lowery, and all sorts of feels.


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